mattmatt.livejournal.com

So, in August, there's going to be a Citizen-Initiated Referendum in New Zealand. A referendum happens when ten percent of the eligible voting population (citizens and permanent residents over 18, IIRC) sign a petition calling for one. In this case, the question at issue (brought by "right-thinking" New Zealanders in response to the government's controversial "anti-smacking" amendment to the Crimes Act) is:

"Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?"

Which, basically, is a crock of shit, and of no use at all for proper debate. It completely sidesteps the question of whether a smack CAN or SHOULD be part of "good parental correction", which is in essence the issue at stake. I don't think anybody would argue that a smack as part of habitual child abuse ought not to be a criminal offence, for example.

What matters is not the intention ("I do it out of love") but the outcome: how many children turn up at New Zealand schools with bruises and black eyes because their father or their grandmother or their uncle or their mum's boyfriend has beaten them to a pulp "out of love"? If the answer is more than none (and here I should point out that New Zealand has the sixth highest rate of child abuse in the world, for whatever definition of "child abuse" is used for such things), then the follow-up question should really be whether that is ever acceptable?

Its detractors claim that the law is an example of the nanny state coming into their homes and telling them how to raise their children, but the law isn't designed to "make criminals out of decent parents". Look at 59(4) of the Act:

To avoid doubt, it is affirmed that the Police have the discretion not to prosecute complaints against a parent of a child or person in the place of a parent of a child in relation to an offence involving the use of force against a child, where the offence is considered to be so inconsequential that there is no public interest in proceeding with a prosecution.

(Emphasis mine.) It simply recognises that people who beat up kids need to be stopped, and that as a society, we need to arm the right people with the ability to tell families whose children, "out of love", end up in hospital (or worse) that their concept of love is unequivocally and unacceptably broken. It puts the responsibility where it needs to be: if you break a child's ribs and he ends up on a respirator, it's not because he was being a little shit, it's because you beat the crap out of him.

It's a criminal offence to do this to another adult, so why should it be any different for a child?

I'd really, really like to know what people think about this. I was smacked as a child, and I'd like to think that I grew up OK, but what concerns me is that other children in my country were smacked as children and never grew up at all.

Over at this internet they have an interesting story about how they made a kind of neuron soup that they hooked up to some sensors and motors, to see if biological brain + sensory inputs + mechanical outputs = some kind of artificial life. It does pretty well at mechanical learning (getting better at not crashing into stuff), but what I found interesting was that, because the robot is dependent on biological cells, its lifespan is effectively limited because the cells deteriorate and its brain turns to sludge.

My first reaction was, a wetware lifespan limit would be an effective tool in controlling a possibly violent robot population.

Also, hi. I keep meaning to post here — actually, even that is probably not very true. Mostly I wrote this here because it is too long for The Twitter and too short for my proper Interblog. I am talking like this because I have been listening to too much Like A Mad Dog Running Through A Puddle Of Gravy. Which is to say, you all have not been listening to enough LaMDRTaPoG.

And now, prolonged silence continues.

Right now, I am enjoying Tettix's wonderful (and free!) Rites, which is a sort of glitched-out reworking of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps. It is excellent. If you are at all in favour of glitchy orchestral/electronic crossovers (and here I include artists like Venetian Snares, 65 Days of Static and Acoustica), you should make your way there post-haste and download it. And then listen to it. With your ears.

Q: What's yellow and triangular with six legs and a hardened, tri-sectional carapace?

A: Gregor Samosa.

I am converting numbers into words.

OK, so there is code out there to do this already, but the most commonly-cited Ruby solution requires the Linguistics gem, which is HUGE if you just want to display the number of comments on your blog or what-have-you. So I thought I'd have a go at it. It turned out not to be so hard, so I'm kind of internationalising it: so far, I support UK English, US English, French, Esperanto, and Romanian (!). You can check out the test cases (entirely readable by humans, I assure you) to see what it can do.

I have some unanswered questions, if anyone is so inclined:

• USAnglophones: Can you think of a rule that governs when you use "a hundred" versus "one hundred"? So far, I think I am assuming that, where a speaker of UK English would say "a hundred and twenty-five", you would say "one hundred twenty-five" (again, see the test cases), and only use "a" where the hundred (or the million) is by itself ("a million", not "one million"). But I could be way off-base.
• In general, I am short on information on pronouncing negative numbers ("minus five") or numbers too big for my calculations (I assume anything over a billion or so is too unwieldy to be required). I can't even do it confidently in French. Ideas? (Again, Americans: "minus five" or "negative five"?)
• Anyone else like to provide some rules?

It's really interesting seeing how succinctly one can represent a set of rules like this. The champion so far has (predictably) been Esperanto (four rules and fourteen base cases); maybe I'll add Klingon for comparison.

The playlist on the office iPod has 272 songs.

At a crude average of 3:30 each, that's just under 16 hours.

At 8.5 hours per day, that's less than two days' worth of music.

It's been on all day, every day, for three weeks.

It's mostly Jack Johnson, Café Del Mar and Dido.

I am ready to shoot someone.

1. What are your nicknames?
Um, I guess "Matt" is as much of a nickname as I have. Nobody really even calls me "mattmatt" anymore. One person calls me "honey", but she insists on abbreviating it as "hun" (as opposed to "hon"), which irritates me.

Would you rather die suddenly with no pain but no prep time or die with some pain but time to prepare?
Definitely suddenly. I hate pain.

3. If you're in a relationship what do you most miss about being single? If you're single what do you most miss about being in a relationship?
I miss spontaneity.

4. How many colors are you wearing now?
Six: blue, grey, red, black, white and another blue.

5. Are you an introvert or extrovert?
Both, in varying degrees. Definitely takes more effort to be extroverted these days.

6. What was the last book you read?
The Confusion by Neal Stephenson. Yet to achieve critical forward momentum on The System Of The World.

7. Let's play everybody's favorite game...what would you do if you won the lottery?
Overestimate my new-found wealth.

8. Do you like snow?
Yes. Do you like hammocks?

9. Is there anything that has made you unhappy these days?
There always is.

10. What was the last thing you ate today?
I haven't eaten yet today.

11. How long does it take you to get ready in the morning?
Half an hour. Oddly, it takes me longer to get ready in the evening.

12. What websites do you visit daily?
This would have been a difficult question to answer before Google Reader. Apart from that: Facebook and LiveJournal.

13. What classes are you taking right now? And if you're not in school anymore, what's your job?
I weave together the internet from the dreams of small children, and unicorn saliva.

14. Do you like to clean?
No. I like to be clean. I like to have clean. I like to have just cleaned. But the actual process irritates me both physically and emotionally.

15. What do you want for Christmas?
I can't think of anything I want that I might conceivably receive.

16. What are you doing right now?
What a sublimely tautological question.

17. Who was your childhood idol?
Bonus poetry answer.

18. What would you do if you see $100 lying on the ground?
Surreptitiosly check that it isn't a) glued down, or b) religious propaganda, before putting it in my pocket. There's an infinitessimally small chance of my being able to determine legitimate ownership: roughly equal to the chance of my finding a $100 note (I presume it's just one note) lying on the ground.

19. What is your dream car?
I don't remember ever driving in my dreams. I am usually either already where I need to be, or unable to leave.

20. Tell me something you love about the person who tagged you.
elfin_archer is always at the ready with the fearsome glomping.

I tag, um, everyone. That must be at least eight.

So. I don't know if I've mentioned this, but I bought an iPhone with (some of) the money from my very first professional writing job. It's pretty excellent: the killer app for me is having a proper calendar that I actually bother to a) take places, and b) keep up-to-date, so that the only appointments I really miss anymore are ones I made two months ago, before I got the phone. And, really, that's just punishment for people naïve enough to assume I can commit to anything two months in advance.

All of which is to say that I am posting this from my iPhone. I don't expect to do this often: while it is true that the typing experience on (the) iPhone vastly surpasses any other mobile phone I've had, it's still dentistry compared to using a real keyboard. More to follow?

I am having fun writing unit tests! On one level, this is weird. But on another, who wouldn't have fun writing the following test code?

	Role[:wizard].grant_permission_to! :hug, User
	@user.grant_role! :wizard
	@user.should be_able_to :hug, @another_user
	@user.should_not be_able_to :hug, @tiger

Wizards and tigers? That is awesome!

Cross-posted from a (friends-locked) discussion on how US accents sound to non-US people, because I'm interested in further input, especially from those whom I purport to represent herein (and apologies if I have misrepresented you in doing so).

I would guess that since most of the American we hear is from movies based in either New York, Washington DC or California, the 'standard' American accent is deemed to be whichever one of those is on at the time. Certainly, when called upon to perform an American accent, most New Zealanders I know will probably hit somewhere around LA, but with a curious over-rounding of certain vowels: New Zealanders pronounce 'car' as 'kaa', not 'kar', but this leads to the over-insertion of Rs in unexpected and random places (like 'farther' instead of 'father') when putting on an American accent.

We read the same things, I think, into the Surfer Dude and Valley Girl accents, but there are some wider regional ones, I think, which are possibly less conscious? I base this list on my experience as an actor working in a company of improvisers who are constantly called upon to provide a variety of accents to portray certain character types, often in a shorthand or caricatured fashion. (Warning: some of these might sound slightly racist or offensive, for which I apologise profusely, but this is just my thoughts on the way these accents are perceived and the associations they entail.)

• TEXAS: redneck, racist, bible belt, oil tycoon
• ALABAMA: inbreeding, banjo-playing
• MINNESOTA: slightly kitschy, family oriented, slow-witted but big-hearted
• BOSTON: slightly quirky (viz., every Tom Hanks character ever, even the ones not from Boston)
• CHICAGO: 1930s gangster
• BROOKLYN: wise guy (seldom distinguished from CHICAGO)
• QUEENS: Fran Drescher
• NEW YORK JEWISH: New York Jewish
• GEORGIA, KENTUCKY: Southern Belle type, or wealthy bourbon drinker, depending on gender.
• MAINE: Rural type. Possibly about to die horribly.

I think this is most of the ones I would hear being used on a semi-regular basis, apart from GENERICAN, which is the above mentioned pseudo-LA accent. Sometimes we will do entire scenes in GENERICAN for no particular reason (and to the consternation of the Artistic Director). Other times, we will do scenes in our natural New Zealand accents, and a GENERICAN-speaker will crop up. When this happens, they are usually either some kind of rich, successful, famous person, a shifty snake-oil merchant, or THE VILLAIN OMG, in much the same way that many American movies and TV shows seem to use generic (and often awful) English accents to indicate varying degrees of oafishness or perfidy.

Last year I was cast in Catch-22, and had 5 roles. The easiest place for me to start was to pick five different accents, but in case this is interesting:

• CLEVINGER (cynical, agitated, resigned to his fate): Boston
• TOWSER (office lackey): Minnesota
• FIRST DOCTOR (neurotic, ambitious): New York
• FIRST INVESTIGATING OFFICER (cold, manipulative, evil): Ostensibly Kentucky. Actually, kind of a cross between Christopher Walken and Brian Cox, if you can imagine that.
• SECOND M.P. (blindly militaristic, mildly thuggish): Alabama (N.B. I think I had a total of two lines as this character, one of which was almost certainly "SIR, YES SIR")

OK, so. This Star Trek movie thing: I have some questions.

If you are currently authoring what will become the four hundredth blog post to turn up in my Google Reader feed today about the new MacBooks (which, it must be said, are pretty damn sexy), kindly do me a favour and refrain from starting it with “just in case you missed it”. There have been so many posts about the announcement that the (ever-so-slightly-) latecomers have taken to prefixing their technogasmic outpourings with this most perfunctory of apologies: so ubiquitously, in fact, that a third wave has begun, in which the authors lament the proliferation of blog posts acknowledging the pervasiveness of other blog posts about Apple's shiny new offerings.

And I, gentle readers, am the surly surfer atop that third wave. Please, no more! Fill my consciousness instead with helpful hints, Papercraft Poes, or (at the very least) barely-literate kittens.

Only, please, no more MacBooks.

Thank you for your consideration.

Looking at this, and trying to think of an appropriate caption...

Apologies to people who have no idea what I'm talking about. Maybe Karen, Robyn, Rebecca and Jeff will be the only people who truly appreciate the genius of such a witticism. Maybe not even them.

So, in preparation for this journal piece, I was looking back over previous entries for all my whiny stressing and stressy whining about the South Island Street Salsa Championships, for which I have been strenuously preparing (at the rate of 10-15 hours per week) for the last three months or so. There wasn't actually all that much, although that perhaps belies the amount of nervous energy I've expended in the last few weeks: that has perhaps been more accurately and immediately chronicled on Facebook, the great magnet that inexorably drains my capacity for self-description in small, one-sentence chunks beginning with the phrase "Matt is".

Anyway, the competition was last night. Salient facts:

Afterwards, there was lots of dancing and partying and general pleasantness. Then we went out for more dancing (because the place with the first dancing closed), and then, while I was asleep, someone beat me up and stole an hour, so that I woke up late, tired, sore, but quite happy, and with an honest-to-goodness silver medal to prove that it wasn't all just a dream.

Photos on The Flickr and, of course, on Facebook.

Back to class tomorrow to start finishing learning the routine we have to have down for the Christmas party in eight weeks or so.

• Put your music player on random.
• Post the first line from the first 32 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
• Let everyone guess what song and artist the lines come from.
• Bold the songs when someone guesses correctly.
• Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!

Note: I have taken the liberty of removing instrumentals and mash-ups

1. Sara (spelled without an H) was getting bored (Ben Folds, Zak and Sara: externalcombust)
2. Stay away from me (Muse, City of Delusion: entomocephalous)
3. Three: that's the magic number (De La Soul, The Magic Number: enidw)
4. Are you such a dreamer? (Radiohead, 2+2=5, externalcombust)
5. Something has to change (Tool, Stinkfist: externalcombust)
6. Don't fret, precious, I'm here (A Perfect Circle, Pet: externalcombust)
7. Girl! (Electric Six, Gay Bar: entomocephalous)
8. I was born in a factory, far away from the milky teeth (Modest Mouse, Steam Engenious: jwm)
9. Scared of a buncha water? Get outta the rain!
   Order a rapper for lunch and spit out the chains
10. They all said she's just another groupie slut (Coyote Shivers, Sugar High: cactus_cat)
11. How does it feel? (New Order, Blue Monday: jwm)
12. Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens and Staten (Beastie Boys, Open Letter to NYC: starlajo)
13. I feel like a quote out of context, withholding the rest (Ben Folds Five, Best Imitation of Myself: cactus_cat)
14. We've got everything (Modest Mouse, We've Got Everything: jwm)
15. Well, he shouted out his last word as he stumbled through the yard (Ben Folds Five, Fair: cactus_cat)
16. War is overdue (Muse, Assassin: entomocephalous)
17. They say that life ain't easy (Smashing Pumpkins, That's the Way (My Love Is): entomocephalous)
18. It's bugging me, grating me (Muse, Hysteria: amarynth)
19. Where do we go from here? (Radiohead, The Bends: externalcombust)
20. Do you not hear me anymore? (Ben Folds Five, Battle of Who Could Care Less: genedecanter)
21. In a falling dream, would you wake me up?
    Or just let me drop? (Strawpeople, Beautiful Skin: comikaze)
22. I'm never coming back; I'm never giving in (Smashing Pumpkins, Fuck You (An Ode to No-One): entomocephalous)
23. Beautiful girl, lovely dress (Gnarls Barkley, Gone Daddy Gone: anarchangel23)
24. Girl! (The White Stripes, Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine: entomocephalous)
25. If it's a bad day, you try to suffocate (Placebo, You Don't Care About Us: jwm)
26. High above the mucky-muck (Tenacious D, Wonderboy: anarchangel23)
27. She shone up bright like a knife (The Shins, Turn a Square: angmonster)
28. Well, things get hectic quick (Beastie Boys, Remote Control: anarchangel23)
29. Friends say it's fine (Placebo, 20th Century Boy: angmonster)
30. Monkey play in the jungle
    Robot work in a factory
    They will have a giant rumble
31. Panic on the streets of London (The Smiths, Panic: anarchangel23)
32. In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey (Beck, Loser: anarchangel23)

Normally I am confused by and distrustful of anything fiscal. This slideshow explaining the subprime mortgage crisis, however, has cleared a whole lot of things up.

I am reading The Confusion at the moment, though, and although it has been long enough since I last read it (and, indeed, since the events it purports to describe) that I forget how it all turns out, it seems to me that this is exactly what Eliza was (fictionally) doing to Pontchartrain in the late 17th century. Which leads me to wonder:

1. How much of that side of the story actually happened, in some form? and, if it's at least slightly true, then:
2. Did they actually have three hundred years' warning about this? or, more likely:
3. Is Neal Stephenson merely some kind of prescient fiscal genius?

There is no real point to any of this. I am Just Saying It. And mentioning thick books and complicated financial transactions in the same post to make myself seem erudite.

(It took me three goes to type "erudite".)

OK, question: how come Interpol and She Wants Revenge sound EXACTLY THE SAME, but there is no discernible connection?

I am quite enjoying iTunes' new Genius feature. So far its guesses have been quite impressive, even if it doesn't seem to know about Two Lone Swordsmen. It does seem to be pulling up Juicebox by The Strokes at every available opportunity, but on the other hand, it also seems quite fond of Spaceman by Babylon Zoo, which is no bad thing. More edge-case testing needed.

Things are ticking along. Very little new to report, except:

• Salsa competition is now less than two weeks away, which is scary.
• This week is our last week in the old office building, which is exciting.
• I am (still, again) looking for a flatmate, which is annoying.
• I am belatedly rediscovering Going Out With Friends, which is lots of fun.
• I've had my new, as yet unnamed cocktail made for me in a couple of bars, and am playing with the proportions, which is SCIENTIFIC.

Um. That is about it. But if you have any questions, I will answer them.

This is how Spring starts.

First, the rain stops. Abruptly, and without warning, you wake up one day in September to the feeling that you could survive the day without a jacket and a scarf. Always a feeling, though, never a certainty: Christchurch will always leave you guessing until about four minutes after you’ve definitely and irrevocably left the house.

And there are daffodils everywhere. They spring up overnight, in little rectangles along the banks of the Avon, golden and optimistic. There are other flowers, naturally, but the daffodils are like a snowflake, a red-brown maple leaf, or a little stylised sun: they are Spring.

Next, the dust. Also without warning, you find your car, your driveway, your outdoor furniture covered in a very fine, very pale green powder. This is Christchurch: the “Garden City” (even officially so, apart from a brief period a few years ago when the City Council went mad and changed the city’s motto to something ridiculous and forgettable). The trees, which have been holding their breath since March, finally let go a sigh of relief and shower the city in pollen. In Spring, at least, Christchurch can always bring a tear to your eye, even if that tear is the precursor of two months of itching and sneezing.

And then, once the mild weather and lengthening evenings have lulled you into a false sense of security, the rain starts again. And so, once again, you wake up, and Spring has changed the city. The rain has found the pollen, and the tiles and cracks in the footpaths are limned with a luminous green paste that eddies sluggishly in the gutters but refuses to wash away.

Spring is suddenly, obstinately, damply here.

Last night was Latin Night at the Loaded Hog:

Me: *dance dance dance* “So, how are you?”

Her: *dance dance dance* “I'm *cough* really sick.”

Me: *dance dance pause* “...oh.”

TWICE.

Now I have The Sniffles.

Also last night, someone asked if I was one of the teachers at Latin Fire. Which would be unremarkable if it had been one of our students, because I kind of have been doing a little teaching, but it was someone from our Rival Studio who wouldn't have known, and has merely “seen me around all the time”.

Unrelatedly, some feedback on this blog article would be appreciated, if you have a few moments.